It’s not you, it’s me. A small guide on how to move on 😉
Intro
From 2022 until now I used to have a blog on Medium. I loved the simplicity and community features that were available like subscriptions, comments, publishing and giving notifications to your audience, and so on.
The only thing that bothered me and eventually made me quit the platform was the lack of full liberty of your content. And by liberty, I mean to do formatting as you please.
Medium is simple and focused on writing, but many times I have found myself wanting more complexity and freedom of using whatever I want to use – from social media sharing to playing with non-standard font sizes and types.
So I went to WordPress and to be honest, the best way to judge something (a service, a job, a relationship, etc.) is by leaving it. How easy is it? Are there any swears involved? (Spoiler Alert: There were!)
Migration
I started this journey by exporting the Medium content. The result? An archive.
Each post/article created is transferred as an HTML page. So from now on you can manually do whatever with them. This is less than ideal for anyone with any technical or not background.
Using WordPress I hoped for a simpler transition to move from one writing platform to another. And there is a solution, but not for self-hosted WordPress but for the service itself. I didn’t want to be free from Medium, to be caught up by the WordPress.com blogging platform. I wanted to be on my own with all the perks and hardships implied.
So I created a WordPress.com temporary blog, where I used the Medium to WordPress plugin to get all the Medium content in a WordPress format.
I then exported everything from WordPress.com in WordPress format to create my blog. (this one)
All the links and images were messed up by the export from Medium so while importing in this site, I had to manually download and upload the images used in Medium here. Doing this for 31 posts was kinda ok but I can’t imagine someone doing it for more than 50. It is insanely annoying to go back and forth for images that you own to move from one platform to another.
If you want to embark on such a migration you need a lot of PATIENCE!
Final notes
My exported content from Medium still looks weird at some point due to different formatting.
But I am ok with it(just a sad reminder of how platforms choose to “retain” users), and maybe I will review it more at some point. The subscribers to my Medium are now a text file that I will try to integrate into WordPress.
The entire process of moving was painful, annoying, and extremely time-consuming. Please enjoy and be free 😉